The top four participants are servicing 31.9% of the nation's mortgages, according to Inside Mortgage Finance.

The home-equity lending business quietly built some momentum over the past three years after nosediving in the aftermath of the housing-market meltdown, but its future growth will depend on several moving parts.

Freddie Mac this week rolled out a new pilot program with the help of Arch Capital Group, the parent company of the nation’s largest mortgage insurance firm. But the pilot – dubbed IMAGIN for “integrated mortgage insurance” – is already stirring controversy.

Several residential lenders suffered through a challenging start to the new year but loan production is starting to warm up as the spring homebuying season nears. Still, higher interest rates are causing consternation with many shops openly worried about plummeting refis and lower profit margins.

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The Senate voted 67-31 last week to pass the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, S. 2155, moving the deregulation debate to the House, which will look for more aggressive changes to roll back the Dodd-Frank Act. House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling, R-TX, said the House would not pass the bill without additional provisions that would further relax regulations introduced after the 2008 financial crisis ...

Earnings from production-related activity and servicing fell modestly in the fourth quarter, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of earnings reports filed by a dozen top publicly traded companies. The 12 lenders reported a combined $1.125 billion in income from loan originations and secondary market sales during the fourth quarter. That was down 9.0 percent from the previous period. Some of the earnings decline resulted from a slowdown ... [Includes one data chart]

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac both saw significant declines in the volume of defective loans that sellers had to repurchase from mortgage-backed securities pools last year, according to a new Inside The GSEs analysis. Mortgage sellers in 2017 repurchased – or made other indemnifications for defects – for just $973.5 million of single-family loans from Fannie and Freddie MBS. It was the lowest annual total since the two GSEs began filing quarterly repurchase disclosures with the Securities and Exchange Commission back in 2012. Buyback volume fell 11.6 percent from the 2016 total, including an 11.4 percent drop from the third to the fourth quarter of last year.

Banks and thrifts increased their first-lien holdings by 4.1 percent in 2017, according to a new ranking and analysis by Inside Nonconforming Markets. Big banks continue to retain jumbo mortgages in portfolio along with some loans eligible for sale to the government-sponsored enterprises. A total of $2.01 trillion in first-lien mortgages were held by banks and thrifts as of the end of 2017, up 1.2 percent from the end of September. Adjustable-rate mortgages ... [Includes one data chart]

Ginnie Mae is considering a risk-sharing pilot that would have private capital absorb some of the potential losses on FHA loans securitized through the agency. In remarks at the Structured Finance Industry Group conference in Las Vegas recently, Michael Bright, executive vice president and chief operating officer with Ginnie, said no decision has been made on any credit-enhancement structure, as consultations with stakeholders are still ongoing. “We are actively looking at structures we can put in place where we bring in private capital to provide a [partial] guarantee,” explained Bright, Ginnie’s acting president. “The FHA is going be involved in a lot of them.” A risk-share partnership between FHA and private credit enhancers not only would protect the Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund but reduce taxpayer risk as well, observers said. The risk-sharing concept would have private mortgage insurers assuming ...

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